I Choose Both

It being the twenty-first century, if I say that I want a boyfriend, everyone around me is obligated to drop everything and reassure my womanhood with cries of, “Oh, sweetie, you don’t need a man!” because, obviously, I want a boyfriend because I’m insecure as a woman and I need a man to define my life.

Oh, the irony!

If I don’t need a man to assure me of my self-worth, why would I need – or want – other women to do it?

The worst part is that the people who do this the most are the people who know me best, the people who should know better than to think that I’m insecure about anything, least of all because of my ovaries.

I don’t need a boyfriend to assure me of my self-worth. I want a boyfriend because having a boyfriend is fun, and who wouldn’t want to have fun in high school?

All I hear and all I see when people give me the you-don’t-need-a-man speech is one more example of the perversion of feminism in the twenty-first century.

First and Second-wave feminism focused specifically on legal differences between men and women, especially voting and women in the workforce. Third-wave feminism is about defining women and being individuals.

In the process, women have defined femininity in such a way that they have redefined it, denying everything that makes us women, and they have so enforced the idea of individuality that we are no longer individuals, but one vast ocean of women in pink “vagina hats.”

There is so much dignity in being a woman. We were endowed with the gift of motherhood, but now we’re expected – by other women, no less – to forsake that birthright and exploit our sexuality for our own pleasure, which is the most selfish thing I can imagine.

Feminism could have helped repair the union between men and women that was destroyed at the Fall of Humanity (Genesis 3:16), but it just broke it more. The movement convinced women that men are and always will be domineering dunderheads and the best way to improve the situation is by also acting like domineering dunderheads.

I do not want to be a domineering dunderhead, or any other kind of dunderhead, for that matter. I want to grow up, get married, and have children, not because I am a woman, but because I am a human being and that is what we do (On that note, I do not think men are domineering dunderheads, at least not most of them and not by nature).

And, yes, I want a career too, but that’s the point: the whole idea of feminism was that women should be able to have both, or have the power to choose between one and the other. I want both. I choose both.

Right now, though, I don’t want kids or a career. I just want a boyfriend.

Nice job, Phoebe, of expressing your feeling. You truly have a gift for writing. May I suggest to all the Amat students who read The Lance that they pick-up a copy of Theology for the Body. There is a ‘high school edition’ published by Ascension Press. You can’t go wrong with the teachings of St. John Paul II. God bless!